29 September 2013

what an amazing year
so many great albums
look it up for yourself
I’d get nostalgic but
unfortunately no-one
around here could care
too much about the 90s
meanwhile you were
what 6 how does that
make you feel it’s really
hard to tell now you are
linked to ≈10000 images
it’s funny in my fantasies
I’m the one who dies
you stay here looking as
always excellent in black

9 September 2013

the mountains are hazy with timeless passivity
sprawling monotonously in the left-hand corner
while clouds diffuse and fill the entire top half
before bumping daintily into a bright red parakeet
perched suicide-like on a beautiful gnarled branch
arched by the weight of fruit and one ripe peach
hung a motionless inch from the gaping beak

here is transient beauty
caught in permanence
but of what avail is such perpentual unattainment?

7 September 2013

For 2012, I made a resolution to read a poem every day: I like poems; I should read more of them. I kept it up through 2012 and well into 2013, before finally succumbing – not wanting to read another poem about divorce in Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap at the end of a busy day. But I have learnt things: not least how simple it is, if you want to, to read a poem. There are lots of them! There are lots of short ones! The internet is full of them! And there is plenty of poetry – just buy some books and put them by your bed and then actually pick them up. If you read a poem that does nothing for you, that’s fine; don’t feel guilty or the necessity to have to do it critical justice: tomorrow you might read something lovely. Whereas otherwise I really am interested in the serious, in-depth analysis of literature, this resolution allowed me to focus on a more instinctual feeling for poems.

This blog was intended to record some of the arresting or calming or witty or stimulating poems I came across as a result of my new reading; and, as something of an evangelist, or at least apologist for the potential role of poetry in anyone’s life, the focus is on short work that can fit into the day. Poetry doesn’t have to be life changing – sometimes a poem might just make you smile. That’s enough (and I think Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch would agree). At least, enough to begin with, or for most days.

The blog was therefore also a reason to keep reading on – to find new things I wanted to put here. Gradually other favourite poems crept in, things I knew before. One of the significant reasons for eventually failing the resolution was that it had always really been a resolution to read something new, something I hadn’t read before – to go and search out some of the big names I hadn’t read, and actually buy new work too (as such, buying winners or nominees for the major prizes – the Forward, T. S. Eliot, and the like – became an easy shortcut around actually being ‘on the pulse’ of new work; anybody following those prizes would probably be unsurprised by much of the work here). But then I realised I wanted to go and reread things, enjoy things in a different way – pick Human Chain back off the shelf, and see what I remembered, what I had forgotten. Posting a Heaney poem the day before he died is now, for me, a small but memorable coincidence, and will ensure I remember a more personal attachment to his work – the sort that can fade less than a mere opinion when a poet truly passes on into the public domain.

It has been, therefore, quite a productive and enjoyable New Year’s Resolution. One of the better ones.

7 September 2013

Then the creature on the label of our favourite red
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervour to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cosy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine on it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It’s so quiet,
and empty, when he’s left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauvequi peut – let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old vow
have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

//

In my lazy way, I thought I’d save myself typing this out by ripping it from elsewhere. And then, checking, I realised that the version I found had a number of differences – as it was taken from a version published in The New Yorker in 2003. Good revisions, I think, and interesting to see.

7 September 2013

personally i can’t remember hearing of a time there was so much
well-written work being produced all of it extremely well-written
S’s first novel is excellent H’s new collection is also excellent
i’m told how nice it is to see that I T and E finally have their
books out i’m sure they’ll receive excellent reviews in the broadsheets
it’s no exaggeration to say that there are not enough minutes
in the day to give each the attention they undoubtedly deserve